"He, too, has come with me from the land beyond the sunset."
Awa spoke rapidly in the Pawnee tongue, and one of the medicine-men, a brightly painted, elderly man with wrinkled face, took up the conversation in Comanche.
"It was foretold by the white man at the stake that you would come," he began.
"That is likely," admitted Tawannears, unperturbed.
"He told us," continued the medicine-man, with a fearful look over his shoulder at that black figure bound to the tree-stump, "that he served a God who would come to us from the sky, and when we asked him if he meant Tirawa, the Old One in the Skies, he said no. But when we asked if this new God would come from the sunset he said it might be, that He would come in a great blaze of glory, with power to bend all to His will. Is this Taivo at your side the God of whom the first white stranger spoke?"
Tawannears turned and translated swiftly the gist of this to me.
"Say that we come to herald the coming of that God," I directed him. "Even as the white man at the stake came to tell the Chahiksichahiks that we should come to them from the setting sun."
The medicine-man and his fellows, even the fierce Awa, heard this announcement with growing awe.
"For a sign," added Tawannears, "the Taivo, who permits me to call him brother, and who is attended by the great white warrior who has the strength of many buffalo showed Awa, the war-chief, how he could turn aside arrows and direct them against his enemies. Let Awa speak for me!"
The war-chief admitted the fact, no longer surly, but agitated by a sense of the prestige attaching to him as a principal participant in a miracle transcending any like event his people had ever known.